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I'm a software engineer and a digital circuit designer, and I am convinced that it is absolutely insane to base elections on electronic voting machines which have no audit trail and no means to recount the ballots. Diebold richly deserves all the grief it is getting. The company should have known better, and if it didn't know better it shouldn't have gotten into the business.

Optical-scan ballots, with a few features added to prevent ballot alteration, seem like the most cost-effective and efficient means of running an election. What advantages do ballot-printing DRE machines offer that can even begin to justify their cost?

Optical-scan ballots, with a few features added to prevent ballot alteration, seem like the most cost-effective and efficient means of running an election.

I have no problem with optical-scan ballots, and they may well be more cost-effective. For that matter, I like the punch card system which my county (Ventura, CA) uses. The voter actually punches out the holes with a positive-action lever machine; there are no perforated ballots or hanging chads, and the system is reliable and accurate.

I have no technical objection to touch-screen video terminals, just so long as there is a verifiable paper trail. Without that, they're shit.

As to what advantages a video terminal system might have over optical scan, there are some potential advantages if the right system was used. For example, see David Chaum's proposal for Secret-Ballot Receipts and Transparent Integrity.